This week’s episode is slightly different from the norm – it was recorded off the fly and in the moment as a fireside style discussion. Walid had the opportunity to speak to Timothy Dwyer and Michael Fulton from Nationwide. During this podcast, we get an overview of Nationwide,  discussed their perspective and lessons learnt on blockchain and its recent Proof of Insurance POC.

First a little about our guests:

Timothy Dwyer, Vice President & Assistant Treasurer to Nationwide, returns to our podcast to provide some further insight into blockchain from Nationwide’s perspective. Tim’s role at Nationwide covers banking, credit and debt finance.

Michael Futon, Associate VP Technology Innovation, makes his debut appearance. Michael is the representative for Nationwide at the RiskBlock Alliance.

 

What is blockchain?

Michael answers this question from an innovator’s perspective –

Blockchain allows participants to do things differently – its key properties are its decentralised nature and immutability.

 

How important is immutability?

Michael points out that it is difficult to find perfect use cases for blockchain. Walid posed an interesting question – wouldn’t tamper evidence in a system/solution be enough? Michael and Tim both agreed that in many use cases, it would be more practical to have a system that permits (but records) changes as mistakes are bound to happen!

Although many use cases do not warrant the need for immutability, some specific cases such as asset transfer do require immutability (to prevent fraud and other forms of charge-back scams.) In some cases, reversibility may in fact be a desirable property – as referenced to during the discussion, in 2016, we saw the hack of the (first) DAO (‘DAO’ is an acronym for a ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organization’, recall that recently Hugh Karp from Nexus Mutual made an appearance on Insureblocks with a guest post– the Nexus Mutual is an example of a DAO.)

Following the subsequent collapse of the DAO due to this hack, there was a hard fork on the Ethereum network – this split the network into ETH (Ethereum) and ETC (Ethereum Classic) – the hard fork represented a split in consensus - some parties wanted the DAO attack victims to be returned their money, but others did not. The DAO attack is an excellent example of the case where parties agree to “reverse” transactions on an otherwise immutable network.

As our speakers point out, immutability and irreversibility need not be mutually exclusive – take the example of storing your books of accounts on the blockchain. The standard practice in the accounting profession is to never delete an incorrect transaction but to make a rectifying entry – the same idea may be applied to a blockchain – errors made may be corrected in subsequent blocks with a reference to the block containing incorrect/inaccurate information.

 

An introduction to Nationwide